Jules Adolphe Aime Louis Breton (1827-1906)Jules Breton was born in Courrières, a small Pas-de-Calais village.
He painted peasant imagery such as poetic renderings of single peasant female figures in a landscape posed against the setting sun.
He studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts with de Vigne in Ghent and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
He won medals at the Salon for his paintings in the 1840's and 1850's.
He continued to exhibit throughout the 1870s and into the 1880s and 1890s and his reputation grew
such that he became one of the best known painters of his period in his native France as well as England and the United States.
In 1886, he became a member of the Institut de France.

This picture is a replica, with minor variations, of a composition Breton painted in 1860 and exhibited in the Salon of 1861. In his autobiography the artist stated that he discovered the subject as a "finished picture" one evening in the fields near his native village, Courrières, in northern France.